Göbekli Köyü II: The "Three" Gobeklis of Ancient Anatolia hermetically marked Stars of the Constellation today known as Cancer: Göbekli Köyü Also Shows Importance of Women in Prehistoric Human Society

This posting, Göbekli Köyü II, follows Göbekli Köyü I as an analysis of map locations at that site. As already indicated in a previous posting, it complements our interpretation of the meaning of Göbekli Tepe as a location of ancient land survey by astronomy, marking stars of Cancer.

This posting will be followed by a similar analysis of Aşağı Göbekli and then by some related postings about ancient sites in Upper Mesopotamia that also fit into the astronomical land survey analysis.

Here is our final line drawing result of the traced Google Earth map of Göbekli Köyü.

We have colored that line drawing to better show what it represents, although such a coloration admittedly makes the Göbekli Köyü map look quite a bit like naive art.

The image directly below was our first coloring attempt of the traced map and we were astonished to see hands apparently holding a watering vase, so we retraced the map lines again, trying to get more detail, as can be seen in the final colored version further below.

We retraced and recolored the 1st attempt above to be sure of what we had, and also narrowed the main area shown for purposes of interpretation. Otherwise, it would be too broad to display properly on many personal computers or laptops. Here is the retraced, recolored and narrowed version.

Disputable is whether the vase has a water spout, which looks a bit too modern for our taste, and maybe our original tracing of the water vase without a spout was the more accurate version, which would make more sense in view of the mice of the cat. This question of course can be resolved by examination of the original location.

More pressing is the question of the date for the origin of pottery in this region, as no pottery has thus far been found at Göbekli Tepe, so why would it be pictured at Göbekli Köyü?

George Hill writes persuasively in A History of Cyprus, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2010, about the origins of pottery:

"Gjerstad ... in Antike, IX, 1933, p. 262 ... observes that the nearest parallels to Cypriote Stone Age pottery are to be found in East Anatolia and Syria, and it would seem that the Stone Age culture of North Syria, East Anatolia and Cyprus had a common origin. Schaeffer (Miss. pp. 22-3) notes the resemblance between the Cypriote "aeneolithic" pottery and that found in the lower layers of level IV at Ras Shamra (of the fourth millennium....)""

Speaking of Cyprus, we might note here that the figure we identify as "the Shaman" also looks very much like a map of the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, known since prehistoric times, and now one of the 12 districts (Diamerismata) of Greece. A tie here to Greece or Cyprus would perhaps be a political problem, and that is the reason we stick with "shaman" for now, wherever he might have been from, as a presumed "architect" of the Göbekli Köyü landscape.

A further clue might be offered by the clothing of the woman pouring water on the plant (or tree) at Göbekli Köyü, a plant or tree which appears to have one or two fruits. Could those be apples as an Anatolian forerunner of Eve? And even with a nearby serpent at Hydra. Both of these traced "fruit" circles are somewhat faint on the Google Earth map so they must be viewed as uncertain at the present time unless otherwise verified at the geographic location.

The garment of the watering woman is long dress-type garb, flanged at the top (a cape ?), plus "sunny" broad-brimmed headwear, all of which remind us of ancient clothing in Spain. We read, however, about ancient clothes at A Brief History of World Costume:

"The first evidence of woven linen (flax) cloth dates back to the early 6th millennium BC in Turkey, but Western Europe did not produce any known flaxen cloth until about 3000 BC. Also found in Turkey is evidence of some of the first known fiber-dying. Red-dyed thread from 6000 BC was found at Catal Huyuk."

E. J. W. (Elizabeth Wayland) Barber writes in Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean:

"The fact that the Aegean people, like the Anatolians, knew how to weave and were doing so is steadily attested, from the Middle Neolithic on, but the scraps are so tiny as to give us virtually no further information."

That book has a short synopsis at Amazon as follows:

"This pioneering work revises our notions of the origins and early development of textiles in Europe and the Near East. Using innovative linguistic techniques, along with methods from palaeobiology and other fields, it shows that spinning and pattern weaving began far earlier than has been supposed. "Prehistoric Textiles" made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone assumed before the book's publication. The textile industry is in fact older than pottery - and perhaps even older than agriculture and stockbreeding. It probably consumed far more hours of labor per year, in temperate climates, than did pottery and food production put together. And this work was done primarily by women."

Accordingly, it is entirely within the realm of probability that woven cloth of wool or linen was known in the already technologically advanced era of the three Göbeklis. The developing Göbekli decipherment, by the way, was one reason that we recently posted about the new "woven" 3D-printing Nike Flyknit shoes, which we now wear, as we were then looking into ancient weaving history.

It must be noted that the Ancient Greeks were allegedly the first in ancient Europe who had a wide-brimmed "sun hat", called a petasos, usually worn by people in agricultural pursuits, and often worn by women together with a type of cloak or cape called a peplos, but the date of origin of these is unknown. The female water-pouring map figure, by the way, need not necessarily be said to wear a wide-brimmed "hat" as such, for it could well have been some other kind of circularly furled protective headwear.

The following image shows the stars of the heavens represented by our traced drawing of the Göbekli Köyü Google Earth map, here applied to a star map from Starry Night Pro at http://astronomy.starrynight.com showing stars having a brightness magnitude better than 6 (i.e. less than 6, for the reason that, as explained at the Wikipedia: "the brighter the star, the smaller the magnitude: Bright "first magnitude" stars are "1st-class" stars, while stars barely visible to the naked eye are "sixth magnitude" or "6th-class"."

The match between the stars of Cancer and Göbekli Köyü is a pretty good one, especially if it was 9000 years ago, except for some difficulty matching the fingers of the watering woman's hands, the later "claws" of Cancer, as it were, whose Arabic name Acubens as "claws" applied only to the star alpha Cancri and not to the other stars of Cancer. This drawing shows why, because it originally applied only to hands envisioned at this star of Cancer.

Although we are fully convinced that the ancients were astronomers and that the three Gobeklis all related to stars of Cancer in the prehistoric era, our interpretation here must be regarded to be VERY SPECULATIVE since we have not ourselves been in person at the Göbekli Köyü geographic site and rely solely on the map at Google Earth, without any other site information.

To be sure, a woman in woven clothes and wide-brimmed headware watering a plant in 7400 B.C. with a spouted vase would be a sensation. We urge others to look at an unworked Google Earth map of Göbekli Köyü to see if you come up with similar (or better) line drawing results.

One should also recall that a date of 7400 B.C. may be way too early, and that the figure at Göbekli Köyü could derive from a much later date.

What is especially problematic is that we have no way of knowing whether the things we identify as stars "mirrored" on the ground are modern or ancient constructions on land.

Some of the lined-up objects look like they could be trees and may not represent stars at all, unless planted atop previously existing mounds.

So, caveat emptor, i.e. be careful and regard the ideas here as hypothesis, which may, or may not, be confirmed down the road..

Nevertheless, we thought it better to publish these ideas in spite of the readily apparent issues, which we note here in advance of the critics.

There are critics out there who would silence everyone who does not think as they do and who resent anyone who dares to publish things on the edge of current knowledge. We do not write for them. They always represent a closed-minded minority that in every era fades away eventually.

Thankfully, we live in an era where freedom is appreciated by many. We hope you enjoy our writings and appreciate that there is more to the three Göbekli locations near Sanliurfa than previously imagined.

If right, our ideas will ultimately be useful.
If not, very little is lost by raising these topics for discussion.

Göbekli Köyü I: The "Three" Gobeklis of Ancient Anatolia hermetically ("as above, so below") marked Stars of the Constellation today known as Cancer, based on Analysis of a Google Earth Map of that Site

This posting (Göbekli Köyü I), as already indicated in a previous posting, complements our interpretation of the meaning of Göbekli Tepe as being ancient land survey by astronomy.

It will be followed by Göbekli Köyü II, Aşağı Göbekli and some related postings about ancient sites in Upper Mesopotamia that also fit into the astronomical land survey analysis.

Here we look more closely at two virtually unknown Göbekli locations named "Gobekli" (more correctly "Göbekli"), in the general environs of Sanliurfa, a city which was earlier named Urfa viz. "Ur" and according to legend was Biblical Patriarch Abraham's birthplace in Anatolia, which is today's Turkey. Both of these Göbekli locations appear to mark stars in what we today call the constellation of Cancer, though of course not identically.

To recapitulate:

• We first found that there was a land survey of the ancient world made by astronomy, a survey suggesting that Göbekli Tepe might have marked the stars of Cancer at the Vernal Equinox in ca. 7400 B.C. This will become more clear in a subsequent posting, which includes "Upper Mesopotamia".
  
  



• We then found that the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe marked stars of Cancer and some stars in its vicinity, e.g. toward Leo on the ecliptic
  
  
  
  


• we then found that there are "three" Gobeklis in Sanliurfa, not just one

These 3 GOBEKLIS are:

1. Göbekli Tepe, ca 35 kilometers distant from each of the other two
2. Göbekli Köyü to the west of Şanliurfa (ancient Urfa), whereas Göbekli Tepe is to the northeast of Şanliurfa, ca. 35 kilometers distant from Göbekli Tepe and Aşağı Göbekli.
3. Aşağı Göbekli which "Google Translate" renders as "down roundabout" but which seems to mean "lower Göbekli" and which is to the south of Şanliurfa, ca. 35 kilometers distant from Göbekli Tepe and Göbekli Köyü.

Obviously, if Göbekli Tepe marked Cancer, then these are the same two "lines" of Cancer that in today's astronomy are seen to run from delta Cancri (Asellus Australis) and the Beehive Cluster to alpha Cancri (Acubens) in one case and to beta Cancri (Altarf) in the other case.

The ca. 60° angle formed at Göbekli Tepe by the two lines running to Göbekli Köyü and Aşağı Göbekli appears to be virtually the same as the angle formed by the lines running from delta Cancri to alpha and beta Cancri.

At Sanliurfa, a line extended from Gobekli Tepe to Asagi Gobekli is of nearly equal length to a line extended to Gobekli Koyu. Stars on the same line to beta Cancri as we use today could have been used in prehistoric days, but the ancients may have used stars closer to delta Cancri for making measurements. Beta Cancri is somewhat more distant from delta Cancri than alpha Cancri.

That analysis appears to hold true, although we can not be sure. We have not been at the actual site, and can not know if the objects we suggest as potential prehistoric markings of stars are in fact ancient and not of modern provenance. For the record, here is what we see as possible:

Google Earth shows the following map image for Göbekli Köyü:

We have traced the darkest lines on that map to better identify the objects depicted. Here is that same map with the darkest lines traced.

The next posting shows the result in color, which permits better representation of what is being depicted.

THREE Gobeklis near Sanliurfa (or) What is a Scientist (or an Inventor)? and How are Discoveries and Inventions Made? Göbekli Tepe and Archaeology Raise Some Important Questions About the Scientific Method in Archaeological and other Inventive "Sciences"

Men on the Threshold is the title of the most recent op-ed at the New York Times by David Brooks. He applies lessons of John Ford's cinematic movie "The Searchers" to economics and unemployment in the USA.

We would also suggest to apply those lessons to the "sciences" of Archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, Biblical Studies, Classical Studies, Linguistics and related disciplines, where many are standing at the door to the modern technological age but have failed to step in.

NOTE: 
We have a coming posting on the "three" Gobeklis near Sanliurfa.

But read this below first.

Do you know the names of Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan?
Scientists. The odds are you never heard of them, right?
Their names are relevant to an anecdote which follows.

Look them up at those links and then take a look at the Scientific American Blog Network and a Grace Lindsay posting at their Guest Blog titled:

"I Don’t Know If I’m a Scientist": The Problem with Archetypes.

As a "whiz kid" in my earlier days in education, I was selected to attend a science fair and report to my school on the findings. The real sensation was a new electron microscope by which they had just discovered that humans had only 46 chromosomes (23 chromosome pairs) and not 48 chromosome (24 pairs) as then written in our school textbooks. The discoverers of that were Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan in 1956 via the technology of the electron microscope, which changed the name of the game in the biological sciences.

Excited by this new, fantastic knowledge, I gave a school speech and reported on the new findings, only to have the school authorities stand up in my presence, to my embarrassment, and inform the student audience that until this new finding was "officially" written into school textbooks, 24 pairs viz. 48 chromosomes would remain the correct answer on (the impending) examinations. This event was one of the events that initiated my skeptical view of mainstream science. Not what was true was important, but only that which was entered into the textbooks by the mainstream counted.

That indeed is the "state of the art" in much of science, even today. There is so-called "mainstream" textbook knowledge, and most "scientists" stick to that, thinking they are "practicing" science by doing so. In fact, they are often doing nothing other than parroting the majority opinion in their field -- a relatively safe and easy task, even though mainstream opinion is displaced down the road nevertheless by new discoveries, inventions and insights by a small minority of researchers who ignore the mainstream dictates.
 
In any case, prior to conducting any of my own research or writings, which came years later, and to get a better understanding of mainstream science, past, present and future, I ultimately read Henri Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis (La Science et l'hypothèse) and Science and Method (Science et méthode, as translated by Francis Maitland) from cover to cover.

I know of no other "scientist" in the field of archaeology or related disciplines (Egyptology, Assyriology, Biblical Studies, Anthropology, Classical Studies, Linguistics, etc.) who has read those books, though there may, or, should be some out there somewhere,
"in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic roll[ed] on under the night"
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby).

You may be out there, but I do not know you.
The people I run into in "science" know nothing of Poincaré.

This does not necessarily minimize my respect for sciences such as Archaeology, as long as the archaeologists are doing what they are good at, which is finding ancient sites, excavating them, and recording their findings.

Where our differences begin is in the interpretation of those findings, where the old paradigms are usually slavishly followed by mainstream academics and researchers, often ignoring evidence which points to new, untried paths.

The result is that persons blessed with analytical skills can find themselves wedged between the erring mainstream scholars on the one side and the equally erring esoterics on the other side.

Both of these camps are often so busy following their one-sided, and generally blindered, peer-tyrannical dogmas, that they have no time to examine things in their own field from a neutral, factual perspective, in part because they are all so busy telling the rest of the world how they think "it was".

In any case, many in science think to "practice" science, but do not.

For me, a study of Poincaré's Science and Method had a great impact.
As written at Google Books:

"Henri Poincare's Science and Method is an examination of the process scientists go through when determining which of the countless facts before them will be most useful in advancing scientific knowledge."

Those who have little idea about this creative process are often the critics of new ideas. Poincaré wrote in Science and Method as noted at Wikiquote:

• C'est par la logique qu'on démontre, c'est par l'intuition qu'on invente.
  • It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.
    • Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 129

Poincaré had little patience with critics. He focused on predictive results.

Many people in "science" still do not appreciate the wisdom of Poincaré's writings. As written about Poincaré by Mauro Murzi at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"There is an objective criterion, independent of the scientist’s will, according to which it is possible to judge the soundness of the scientific theory, namely the accuracy of its predictions."

Prediction is the standard.

For years, for example, I argued, based on my analysis of the probative evidence, that Tutankhamun had to be the son of Akhenaten, and DNA evidence has proven exactly that, whereas, by contrast, the then President of the International Association of Egyptologists argued prior to the release of the DNA findings that Tutankhamun was more likely to be a son of the short-lived [alleged] king Smenkhkare. His prediction was wrong and his model was apparently not predictive. Time to retool and reassess the evidence?

Especially in studying man's ancient history and languages, one should always ask: what does the actual probative evidence tell us, and does the prevailing interpretation of that evidence (or even failing evidence) truly provide the predictive value that we are seeking, or are we following false idols?

It is precisely according to this standard that much of the dogma prevailing in Archaeology and related disciplines must be viewed with a very jaundiced eye, because the predictive value of Archaeology's dogmas has proven to be spectacularly unreliable. As I wrote previously at LexiLine:

"Göbekli Tepe is featured at Newsweek online in an article from the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine. At History in the Remaking: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution, Patrick Symmes writes: "

    "The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is 'unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,' according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the 'huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art' at Göbekli, Hodder -- "who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites" -- says: 'Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

 "All our theories were wrong" is the quotation from mainstream science.
 
Question: What kind of "science" is that?
Answer: It is a science in great need of renovation and improvement, especially as to method. "Evidence-based archaeology and not "authority-based" archaeology is required. Obscure peer-review journals as the primary method of archaeological publication show that nothing has been learned.

That so many theories can be wrong is not surprising given the disturbing fact that archaeological "science" bases most of its ruling schoolbook dogmas on the "weight" of the "authority" of past researchers in the field, rather than on the probative evidence itself, which may tell a different story.

Errors are not corrected, e.g. the false chronology of Flinders Petrie. Rather, they are carried along as part of the baggage of academic travel in the discipline.

Another prime example: NO probative evidence of any kind supports the mainstream dating of Moses and Exodus. NONE. Not a single pot shard (potsherd).

But that has not kept the scholarly industry from sticking to the wrong era as lemmings to the sea. What explains that kind of stubborn attachment to theories that are not only wrong, but can never be right? What is it?

Is it the territorial imperative? -- such that the territorial stake in history is more important to than historical truth? As we have written previously:

"Similarly, not only established ways of doing things but also expressed opinions will be defended as a type of territory - as a vested interest, a territorial imperative, true to the motto that "new ideas do not prevail on their merits, rather, they prevail when their "old guard" opponents die out or fall into the minority. There is a lot of truth to that territorial wisdom: see e.g. Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code for a spectacular and also sad example of the territorial imperative in academia."

Gobekli Tepe reveals this critical "authority-based" methodological flaw. It should long ago have led the scholars who are making a living researching man's ancient past to review their prevailing and in part appalling methods from the bottom up. But that has not happened. Things go on as before.

It can hardly be claimed, as is being done -- for an archaeological site which no one yet fully understands, that Gobekli Tepe was the "world's first temple".

The size of the site and sophistication of the stone workmanship itself clearly indicate that the technology visible at Göbekli Tepe must have had precursors.

All things start small, they do not start big. Such sophisticated stone technology does not arise out of nothing suddenly. You have to have tools and methods, and these are a long time in the making. A "big temple" will never be the world's first, by any means, at best only a "small temple" can be.

One has not learned Poincare's message in Science and Hypothesis, as repeated by Mauro Murzi at the at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"For Poincaré, the aim of the science is to prediction. To accomplish this task, science makes use of generalizations that go beyond the experience. In fact, scientific theories are hypotheses. But every hypothesis has to be continually tested. And when it fails in an empirical test, it must be given up. "

Göbekli Tepe and the flaws of mainstream archaeological science and method that it reveals also manifests a tangential connection to the whole field of discovery and invention per se.

Take a look at the 1946 review in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Volume 52, Number 3 (1946), 222-224, by Jacques Barzun of Jacques Hadamard, An essay on the psychology of invention in the mathematical field, Princeton University Press, 1945 (found online at Project Euclid), where Barzun writes:

"[A) question of extraordinary interest in the history of ideas:
How do great discoveries and inventions come about?

Hadmard's answer—limited, of course, to the mathematical field—is based on a variety of evidence: the testimony of contemporary mathematicians, the writings of previous psychologists, philosophers and scientists, the interpretation of certain characteristics (logical or intuitive) in the work of famous discoverers and, finally, the authors own minute introspection.

From a careful analysis and comparison of these diverse materials,
Professor Hadamard concludes that the general pattern of invention,
or, as it might also be put, of original work, is three-fold: conscious study, followed by unconscious maturing, which leads in turn to the moment of insight or illumination.

Thereupon another period of conscious work ensues, the purpose of which is to achieve a synthesis of several elements: the novel idea, its logically deduced consequences including proof, and the traditional knowledge to which the new item is added.

Hadamard's investigation, modest and tentative as are its results,
seems to me of capital importance in the realm of criticism and cultural history.

For what he has done is to show that the human mind tends to behave much the same way whenever it invents, whether in mathematical or in poetic form— a conclusion which does not deny differences of temperament."

Jacques Barzun passed away -- as the 20th century's preeminent historian of ideas -- in San Antonio, Texas, on October 25, 2012, at the age of 104.

The idea of some "scientific" disciplines that "science" in their discipline is their singular, protected territorial plot is simply greatly in error.

In closing, let us take a look at the "folk etymology" ascribed to the name Göbekli Tepe.

One can read everywhere that the name Göbekli Tepe comes from a folk etymology for the site calling it a "belly" or "navel", or "hill of the navel". For most people, and, in fact, for most "scientists", that is enough. They accept that explanation without blinking an eye, because some "authority" has passed it on to them. It saves them the trouble of thinking.

The first Western academic description of the site, however, reads as follows, mentioning multiple "knolls", a text cited in 2000 by Klaus Schmidt in Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations, Paléorient, Volume 26, Issue 26-1, pp. 45-54:

"The mound of Göbekli Tepe, northeast of the town of Sanliurfa in Upper Mesopotamia, was first mentioned by Peter Benedict in his article "Survey Work in Southeastern Anatolia", which was included in the monograph resulting from the 1963-1972 work of the Joint Istanbul-Chicago Universities' Prehistoric Research in Southeastern Anatolia. Benedict reported about the site numbered as V 52/1:

"A complex of round-topped knolls of red earth with slight depressions between, located on a high limestone ridge trending SE. The ridge is otherwise barren of soil. The overall diameter of knolls is 150 m and the rocky red soil rises to 20 m above the limestone top. The two highest knolls have small cemeteries covering the top. The ridge lies at the end of a steep- sided grassy gully 2.5 km NE of village of Karaharabe [= Örencik]. The ridge-top site and grassy W slopes are littered with flint artifacts. No water in vicinity." [emphasis added]

There is no indication that the name Göbekli Tepe applied to only "one" mound and its folks-etymological alleged meaning of "belly", as we shall see below, may be wrong.

The nearest larger village to Göbekli Tepe is Örencik (ören apparently means "ruins" in Turkish), whose name does not help us much in the naming game, but the most significant challenge to the current interpretation of the meaning of the name Göbekli Tepe, comes from the fact that there are THREE Gobeklis in the Sanliurfa area, two of which are, as we shall see, equidistant villages from each other and also to Göbekli Tepe in a virtual equilateral triangle.

The 3 GOBEKLIS are:

1. Göbekli Tepe, ca 35 kilometers distant from each of the other two
2. Göbekli Köyü to the west of Şanliurfa (ancient Urfa), whereas Göbekli Tepe is to the northeast of Şanliurfa, ca. 35 kilometers distant from Göbekli Tepe and Aşağı Göbekli.
3. Aşağı Göbekli which "Google Translate" renders as "down roundabout" but which seems to mean "lower Göbekli" and which is to the south of Şanliurfa, ca. 35 kilometers distant from Göbekli Tepe and Göbekli Köyü.

The name Göbekli now appears to be not only more complicated than "belly" in meaning, but also appears to be part of a larger land survey, which we allege in ancient days could only have been done by astronomy. Indeed, in our next posting we show that Göbekli Köyü and Aşağı Göbekli may be worth a closer archaeological look as marking stars of Cancer on the ground.

In fact, if anyone takes the time to plug the Turkish terms "Göbek" and "Göbekli" into the Google translator, there are various other possibilities among the meanings listed and we have highlighted those that interest us: i.e. not "belly, navel, belly button, paunch" but more so "core, heart, center, center-piece, omphalos, midpoint, branch". 

Although Turkish is an Altaic language, there were Indo-European tribes in this region in ancient days and Göbekli is a term that is very similar to Indo-European e.g. Latvian grābekli(s) meaning "rake" (German Harke), a shape that the stars of Cancer well represent, and which we think to be the stars portrayed at Göbekli Tepe. The "r" is weak and could have been easily lost with time (note that goba means "heap", "cluster" in Latvian), or, as in the case of Cancer, this figure later being seen as the "crab", which is also rooted in the idea of "scratch" as a rake does: The etymology of crab at Wiktionary:

"From Middle English crabbe, from Old English crabba, from Proto-Germanic *krabbô (cf. Dutch krab, Low German Krabb, Swedish krabba), from *krabbōnan 'to creep, crawl' (cf. East Frisian kraabje, Low German/Dutch krabben, German (Bavarian) krepsen), from Proto-Indo-European *grobʰ- 'to scratch, claw at', variant of *gerebʰ-."

At first, we thought our speculative etymology for Göbekli was very tenuous, until we saw these words of other languages for the stars of Cancer in which RAK was prominent, reminding of the "RAKE" meaning  of Latvian grābekli:

• Czech: Rak
• Hungarian: Rák
• Macedonian: Рак (Rak)
• Polish: Rak
• Romanian: Cancerului viz. Racului
• Russian: Рак (Rak)
• Slovene:Rak

The explanation is perhaps found in the derived Hungarian term rákos meaning "reed", which shares the "branch(ed)" idea.

Göbekli thus may not originally have meant "belly", as the folk etymology today has been interpreted, but rather could have stood for the shape of the stars of Cancer, that have a "rake-like" form. Indeed, since all earth topography consists of flat area, valleys, or hilly area, naming a hill a "pot belly" is unlikely, unless over thousands of years time, an original term with a different more specific meaning was similar in phonetic sound.

Take a look at the photographs: by Solluh of Göbekli Tepe and at Michael Cope's blog a photograph of an approach to Göbekli Tepe. The name does not really match the topography.

We mention also, just for the record, but not because we think it to be necessarily relevant: in view of our placement of Göbekli Tepe at Cancer, the center of these stars is formed by the so-called "Beehive Cluster", visible to the naked eye, whose name origin as a concept is unknown in terms of time though traced back perhaps only to the 17th century, but who knows. The "Bumblebee" in Indo-European Latvian is gobene and goba means "cluster".

The next posting shows how the other two "Gobeklis" arguably mark stars of Cancer, though we have not been personally to these geographic locations and can thus not verify whether the "mounds" or other structures that appear to mark stars at those sites are anciently made or whether they are merely structures of modern civilization. It could be a stretch. It could be totally wrong. Only time will tell. We suggest they may be worth an examination.